'He Will Lord It Over You': Understanding the Fall of Adam and Eve’s Impact on Marriage

What Genesis really teaches about sin, power and marriage

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“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he will lord it over you.” Genesis 3:16

I think of all the beautiful aspects of the Genesis account of paradise, the one I perhaps envy most is the perfect relationship between man and woman. (I know, walking with God in the cool of the afternoon seems like a pretty good gig, too.) We have talked about how God created them specifically for each other, and how Adam’s masculinity perfectly complemented Eve’s femininity. And about how the love between them was perfect. They were “naked and not ashamed,” completely transparent to each other. All each wanted was what was absolutely best for the other, all the time.

Can you imagine what our marriages would look like if these two hadn’t messed everything up? Perfect love. No disagreement. No boredom. No hurt feelings. No silent seething. No rejection. No long conversations, talking past each other, wondering how another human being could see things so differently. No possibility of betrayal, on any level. Just total trust, and total gift, one to the other.

That would be amazing.

But alas, they did mess it up. In fact, messing it up was the first thing they did when they sinned. The serpent tricked Eve into eating the fruit. But did Adam step in? Did he protect her during this weak moment? No. He just took a big ol’ bite for himself. And then, when God confronted them, Adam threw Eve under the bus.

“The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.” (Genesis 3:13)  

So much for perfect love.

We talked last time about how, in sin, Adam and Eve discovered for the first time that if they didn’t care so much about the other, they could get more for themselves. They discovered “lust,” which, in the truest sense of the word, means to see another person not as a precious image of God to be honored and protected, but as a commodity, a “thing” to be used toward my own personal ends.

Let’s pick up the story with God explaining to Adam and Eve the consequences of their choice. Adam learns that life isn’t going to be so easy anymore: “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground from which you were taken; For you are dust and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)

Paradise is over.

Then there is Eve’s message. First, he tells her that now childbirth is going to hurt — a lot. Apparently, painless childbirth is another little benefit that we lost. Then he says, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he will lord it over you” (Genesis 3:16).

I think there is a clear message in this passage that bears noting up front. Contrary to some of the half-baked ideas of those who read scripture selectively, God is clear here that any tendency of men to lord their strength over women is actually a result of sin. It is not condoned by him, and it is certainly not biblically mandated.

What is biblically mandated is “love one another.” Full stop.

But here, God is saying that love is going to get more difficult because there will be a rupture between man and woman. A big, huge, cavernous rupture.

Last time, we talked broadly about how Adam and Eve discovered that instead of loving, they could use. This time, I want to talk about the specific impact that has on the relationship between men and women.

Male and female nature didn’t change with the Fall. We still have the same strengths and gifts God gave us from the beginning. But, with sin, Adam and Eve realized that instead of using their gifts at each other’s service, they could use them as weapons. Men, instead of using their strength to protect women, could turn that strength against them. And women, instead of using their relational skills to enhance their relationships, could twist them into manipulation. And, of course, vice versa.

It’s not all malicious. I think in many ways, sin just blinds us to our differences. We assume that the other must surely see things the way we do, and hence we’ve spent thousands of years talking past each other.

But there’s more to it. Pope St. John Paul II believed, and I believe, that there is a strong supernatural element to this. The story of the serpent attacking Adam and Eve at the heart of their relationship demonstrates one thing: Satan hates the love between man and woman. Hates it. That relationship is the heart of the family, which is the heart of society. By disrupting the beautiful harmony of the original male-female relationship, he can disrupt the family and disrupt our entire culture. This was his first opportunity to attack it, and he’s been attacking it ever since.

We don’t have to look far to see this. Of course, there’s the divorce rate. And the multi-billion-dollar Marriage is Difficult™ industry, where books, podcasts and therapists teach us how to navigate relationships when men and women are from different planets. And how many Dateline episodes have you seen where the suspect isn’t a spouse?

Despite that, however, all is not lost. Pope St. John Paul II is clear that the advent of sin in the world did not completely destroy our ability to love. Rather, he said that the heart became a “battlefield” between love and lust. We want to love, and we are capable of loving. But the temptation to selfishness can easily get the upper hand.

I see plenty of happy marriages. But those spouses all admit that it takes work. And that, without that work, the wolves are always at the door. That is why it is so, so important to protect this great gift.

We need to love, certainly. But to do that well, we also need help from a Higher Power — the Holy Spirit — so our love isn’t just sputtering by under our own limited power. We need to pray for that grace daily.

And, most important, we need to pray for protection — for all of our relationships, of course, but especially for our marriages. If the threat is — at least at some level — supernatural, then the remedy needs to be supernatural as well. We need to ask for Divine protection, regularly.

St. Michael would be a good guy to talk to about that. Or St. Raphael. One of those big, beefy Archangel types.